Gionee Gionee lands in trouble: Chinese court says it implanted malware in 21mn phones
Beijing: China’s Judgment Document Network has found smartphone maker Gionee to be guilty of implanting malware in over 20 million smartphones, media reports said.
The latest instance may leave users in different countries, including India, shocked as a large section of the users use smartphones made in China.
According to the court details, more than 20 million Gionee phones were intentionally inflicted with Trojan horse malware via an app between December 2018 and October 2019. The app becomes a tool to profit from users through unsolicited ads and other illegitimate means, Gizmo China reported.
The court found that Beijing Baice Technology Co., Ltd. connived with the defendant Shenzhen Zhipu Technology Co., Ltd. (a subsidiary of Gionee) to implant Trojan horse programs into users’ Gionee phones through the update of the “Story Lock Screen” app. The software is automatically updated on the affected Gionee mobile phones without the user’s knowledge using the Pull method, reported the news portal.
In December 2018, due to the inefficiency of the existing “pull” method, Wang Dengke proposed to implant the hot update plug-in “Dark Horse Platform” into apps such as “Story Lock Screen”.
The app and its SDK version with Trojan plug-ins were upgraded, and then the “Dark Horse Platform” was used to install and update the “Living Trojan Horse” without the user’s knowledge, thereby improving the efficiency of the Pull job. The proposal was implemented later that month, the news portal reported.
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